The Hungate massacre occurred within a context of broken agreements and mounting tensions between American settlers and American Indian tribes in Colorado Territory. In 1861, the Treaty of Fort Wise had been established with American Indian tribes to restrict their access to hunting grounds, relocate them to a reservation, and have them grow crops in exchange for government provisions. However, periods of crop failures combined with the government's failure to honor its agreement to provide provisions led tribes to begin stealing food and livestock to survive. By April 1864, territorial governor John Evans called upon Colonel John Chivington, commander of the 1st Regiment of Colorado, to address the escalating conflict.
On June 11, 1864, the massacre involved the murder of the Hungate family along Running Creek, also known as Box Elder Creek, near present-day Elizabeth, Colorado, approximately 25 miles southeast of Denver. The victims included Nathan Hungate, his wife Ellen, and their daughters Laura and Florence. The family had moved to the area around March 1864 and lived on the ranch of Isaac Van Wormer, where Nathan served as ranch manager. The ranch was located just south of the County Line Road between Arapaho and Elbert counties, east of Running Creek, and north of the town of Elizabeth.
The Hungate massacre served as a precipitating factor leading directly to the Sand Creek massacre of November 29, 1864. The killing of the Hungate family became a catalyst that intensified hostilities and influenced subsequent military responses by territorial authorities, ultimately resulting in one of the most significant and controversial engagements of the period.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
The Hungate family: 4 members (Nathan, Ellen, Laura, and Florence)
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